Happening in parallel to this thematic work was the process of creating music to go with the ideas. For the last couple albums I have written the music loops first, then written lyrics to my favourites before sequencing them out into full songs. That’s again how I worked on Emotional Labour, although by the time I started on the music I had a decent idea of the album’s subject matter and so that likely interacted with the music creation on some level.
It’s hard for me to believe now, since I took 5 years to make the album, but the idea of adding some “trap” influences into the loops was originally to help me work quickly. I was listening to EPs from the rapper Future because my brother told me to, and I couldn’t believe how loop-based they were. Plus I read interviews that they worked really quickly when recording, doing multiple songs in a day in the studio. So one day when I was working on a violin-based cover of the trumpet bridge from Bill Chase’s “Get it On” and I accidentally turned the loop function on on the third measure, I could suddenly hear the Future-style trap bass and drums under that weird, minor-key violin loop.
Trying to make this vision come to life made me realize I didn’t know anything about making trap-style beats. I had listened to a lot, and I had occasionally used cut-up hi-hats and pitched 808 “kicks-as-bass,” but I couldn’t tell you what the distinctive features were enough to do anything but copy an existing beat. So I set out to learn, and the way I did so was to take a couple bars of the basic beat of 15 or so trap songs and recreate them, then analyze them to see what the common things to do were. This was just bass and drums, so I looked at the tempo, key, what bass notes were used relative to the key, and when everything happened. To avoid confusion, in the following section, when I say “kick,” I’m referring to the 808 kick drum sound which producers now frequently use as a bass instrument, on its own or in conjunction with other kick drum sounds.
Superimposing the kick sequences was the moment that convinced me that this exercise was worth doing. When looking at two bar loops of those 15 songs, all of them had a bass note/kick on the first beat of the first measure, which is totally normal. But none of them had a kick on the first beat of the second measure, something that is not true for most rock and pop music. The most basic rock drum beat goes Kick-2-3-4-Kick-2-3-4 (maybe Kick-2-3-Kick-Kick-2-3-4 or Kick-2-3-4-Kick-Kick-3-4). Never putting a kick on the first beat of the second measure was a specific underlying feature that gave the trap songs I analyzed a basic groove. Most had fairly busy bass/kick parts, often including a kick on the “and” 4 in the first measure, and the majority included a kick on the second beat of the first measure. So, at least among the songs that I analyzed, the basic groove was Kick-2-3-4-1-Kick-3-4. Once I learned this “rule,” the things I was trying started to make sense.
Other things I noticed in analyzing songs this way: tempo varied within a fairly narrow range, most of the songs were in minor keys, and the bass notes chosen often included flat 2s and flat 5s, chromatic-sounding notes that contributed to the songs’ dark, menacing sound. I haven’t checked these features against more recent songs, and I’m sure that production in the genre has evolved, but I tried to incorporate these characteristics into my songs. The way I make myself feel better about the appropriative nature of this work is by sticking to older songs, as though if a song has been around for a few years, the exclusivity of its patent had worn off and I was just reverse-engineering a generic version without directly copying anything. Also learning to write within a genre feels better and more respectful to me than using samples or adopting sounds without understanding what’s going on musically.
For the instruments on top of the rhythms I was learning to create, I didn’t try to emulate trap songs so much. But after my inaugural experiment with the “Get it On” loop (which became the beat to the song “Clout Chase”) I went back to the ‘70s rock fusion well and made something based on Chicago’s “I’m a Man.” That became an approach I used when building the beats for Emotional Labour: if I tried something that worked, I would try variations on the same approach to see if I could get something else in the same ballpark. I had said last album that I wanted to use my violin more, and I did that on Emotional Labour. I tried a bunch based on bits of Debussy’s Violin Sonata in G Minor (which I was learning at the time), usually further chopped up by the beat slicer in Guitar Rig. I’ve used this method as a compositional tool in the past, for example on my violin break on Sarah’s song “Saint,” but I think the actual cut-up sounds worked especially well for this trap-style stuff.
Another series of beats were built around the preset arpeggios in soft synths, re-performed by me on violin. Others were just build organically through looping and experimentation; I made the “good” version of the instrumental tracks the first time, whereas in the past I’ve usually re-recorded everything later in the process. This forced me to make some engineering decisions ahead of knowing all the elements I would end up including.
Once I had my basic loops in place, I loaded them into my Boss RC300 as three separate tracks (usually melodic/chordal instruments, then 808 bass, then drums). This way I could make baby steps towards sequencing, practising turning loops off and on while thinking about lyrics and song ideas. That was my process while at home, but I also followed my previous practice of making 5-minute long versions of each loop and getting them on my phone so that I can listen to them while biking around. An interesting accident that I wound up incorporating into the final song happened when I accidentally overlapped my second violin loop idea by a measure when exporting one of these 5-minute long versions. I liked the sound of the overlap and thought it would create interesting lyrical possibilities when transitioning from part to part (which is how “Who Hurts Worse” ended up being a 31 bar loop instead of the more normal 32 bars).
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